Insecticide-treated clothing fights malaria

Spraying clothing with insecticide could provide a powerful new weapon against malaria in the poorest parts of Africa, new research suggests.

A team led by Elizabeth Kimani of the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi studied Somalian refugees living in camps in Kenya. They found that wearing clothing treated with the common insecticide permethrin reduced the chances of malarial infection by 70%.

Efforts to prevent malaria transmission by mosquitoes in Africa currently concentrate on the provision of insecticide-treated bed nets. The World Health Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have provided close to 100 million nets in recent years. Costing less than &dollar;6 each, the nets last up to five years, and have been shown to cut the risk of infection by half.

However, the average household size in Kenya is 4.4 people, and only 3% of households have more than one treated net. So Kimani and her colleagues decided to investigate the extra personal protection offered by insecticide-treated clothes – a strategy already used to protect US military personnel operating in areas affected by malaria.

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Clothes control

The results are impressive, says Desmond Chavasse, global director of malaria control at Population Services International in Washington DC, US, a charity that works to improve healthcare in the developing world. But he warns that the logistics will need further scrutiny.

“We’ve seen this before,” says Chavasse. “Spraying households with insecticides is at least as effective as bed nets, but it only works when 80% of a camp or village is sprayed in a timely fashion. In refugee camps you can control what people wear. How you would do that for the general public, I have no idea.”

Permethrin is thought to be relatively benign, and the study reported no side effects among participants. But Chavasse again believes this may need further investigation. “With skin contact 24 hours a day over long periods of time, that’s a whole other issue,” he says.